Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Families and Community Services) Share this | Hansard source

In rising to reply to the Governor-General’s speech, I would like to acknowledge the great respect that I have for His Excellency and the manner in which he has served our nation as our leader. I think he has at all times conducted himself with great dignity and probity and brought a great deal of respect to the office, and I am sure that he will continue to make an outstanding contribution to Australian public life in the future. During His Excellency’s speech, he outlined a number of initiatives that the Rudd government is intending to pursue. These were detailed in the context of a new government coming into office. He said:

As one of the world’s oldest democracies, it is easy for us to take elections for granted and to fail to appreciate how fortunate we are, to live in a nation where governments change hands peacefully, as a result of the free expression of the will of the people.

Nothing could express the benefits of living in Australia more succinctly than what has been put there.

But what concerned me in His Excellency’s speech was the plan for realigning and reforming our federation in line with the Rudd government’s plans for an Oceania almost, an East Asia or a Eurasia, as have been outlined in George Orwell’s book Nineteen Eighty-Four. His Excellency said that Mr Rudd has:

... a plan of reforming the Federation by forming partnerships with the States and Territories to tackle the legitimate demands of working families for the delivery of better services from all levels of government ...

We do not need to reform the federation in order to get better outcomes and delivery of services for working families; we need state Labor governments to step up to the plate. It is not the responsibility of the federal government to interfere in service delivery, except where there has been a grotesque failure. And that is the challenge that the former government had to deal with for 11½ long years. We should not be messing with our federation. We should not be messing with our Constitution or even suggesting that we do so; it has stood the test of time for over 100 years. It was designed and developed to divide powers between the state and federal governments for the proper government of the country.

Mr Rudd, through his statements of reforming the federation, indicates that he wants to recast it in his image. He said that he wants to end the blame game. The blame game is simply the responsibility game—the responsibility that is spelt out so clearly in our Constitution. Mr Rudd has once again put forward more spin. He has put forward no real substance. He has created a very tight sound bite built around George Orwell’s Oceania where he will play the great oligarch of the party, as it was described, intent on having an all-conquering new order interfering in the everyday lives of Australians.

This contravenes the very nature of our country. It is one of the world’s most successful democracies, as acknowledged in the same process. It has been successful because there has been a very clear division of powers. That is not to suggest there are not areas in which it could improve. Of course there are areas in which it can improve, and the reason it needs to improve is that we have state governments that have been awash in money and spending it most unwisely, ignoring the important things that are meant to go on.

But Mr Rudd has started his prime ministership by trying to redefine the past. By redefining the past, he is casting doubt upon the economic and financial acumen of the previous government—a government that delivered 11½ years of sustained growth, delivered enormous budget surpluses, paid back $96 billion worth of Labor debt and maintained home mortgage interest rates at a lower level than they ever were under a previous Labor government and, indeed, lower than they ever have been under the present government. Mr Rudd has once again borrowed from George Orwell’s novel:

‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’

Mr Rudd is simply seeking to reinvent the past so he can frame his future around a need for drastic measures to sustain Australia’s prosperity. There are drastic measures needed to sustain Australia’s prosperity, but they involve a change of government, and that is going to be at least two or three years away.

We should not be changing our Constitution. Mr Rudd said he has a plan to change the federation. I ask: what plan is this? Have the Australian people been notified of or consulted about these changes that may affect our Constitution or, indeed, the way our federation functions? Simply because state Labor governments cannot fulfil their obligations—or will not fulfil their obligations, I should say—and are neglecting their responsibilities, constitutional change is not necessitated.

During the years of the Howard government, it became very clear that the Labor governments—states and territories—were incapable of properly delivering the services their constituents required, and that is why the federal government had no choice but to step in on multiple occasions and accept further responsibility in order to ensure that the people of Australia were not disadvantaged. But in this brave new world of cooperative federalism, Mr Rudd should be ensuring that the state Labor governments will fulfil their obligations to our broader community.

Rather than constitutional reform, Mr Rudd should be advocating a stronger system for ensuring that the state governments are picking up the areas that they are meant to have picked up. I am not a constitutional lawyer, but certainly I accept the fact that government should have a limited role in people’s lives. I also support the fact that our federation is the best means of ensuring that both service delivery and the national interest are represented at once.

Section 51 of the Australian Constitution highlights the important roles and responsibilities of the federal government. These go to core national issues like defence, marriage, foreign affairs, trade, taxation, communications, quarantine, fisheries and immigration. These are important issues for the government to fulfil to the very best of its ability. Outside of this, the residual powers that are not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution reside with the states. I do not believe that this government should overstep the federal-state boundaries and try to stretch the Commonwealth’s powers beyond what is prescribed in our Constitution. Although I am not a constitutional lawyer, I believe that there are circumstances where it will be necessary to intervene in some particular areas. We can take legal advice on it and, indeed, the High Court has made rulings in this respect before.

Before we take the bold step of deciding to relieve the states of any of their burdens or of proposing a recasting of our federation, we have to ensure that we are not making state governments less and less accountable and less and less significant, lest they disappear altogether. Perhaps the ultimate aim of the campaign is to see the disappearance of state governments. But I have this view, which is rather old fashioned in some quarters, that state governments are better placed for service delivery because they are closer to the provision of services and to the needs of the community than the federal government can be.

It is interesting that as the state governments have received more and more funding over the course of the years they have been seen to be more and more wasteful in their use of this money. In my own state of South Australia, they once budgeted for an increase in public servants of some 600 people but ended up putting 6,000 people on the payroll. You cannot just have an oversight and add 10 times the number of people to the public payroll and then expect your books to balance. Indeed, it is an unfortunate state of being that the books no longer do balance.

State governments have incurred some $40 billion worth of debt and expect it to rise to over $80 billion over the course of the next few years. Why are they doing this? Because they know that the public do not hold them accountable; they hold the federal government accountable. We need to ensure that the public recognise which responsibilities lie with state governments and that the Commonwealth should not be picking up the tab simply because it is in the too-hard basket for them. Over the last decade we have seen the inadequate delivery of services at the state level until the Commonwealth has stepped in. Record tax windfalls have been going to state governments and yet they still squander these abundant resources. Mr Rudd has an obligation not to recast the federation and not to blur the lines of where responsibilities lie between federal and state governments but to make the state governments account for what they are doing and hold them to it.

It would make more sense to reform the federation from a regulatory sense rather than simply stepping in to the service delivery area. Reducing some areas of conflict between state governments would, I am sure, meet with a wide measure of support because what is good for people in one state is usually good for people in other states. Let me give you an example. Occupational health and safety is designed to protect workers and to provide safe working conditions. Why should the occupational health and safety regulations in South Australia be different from those in Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland, Western Australia or anywhere else in Australia? The intention of these laws is to protect workers. The provision of a national regulatory regime would ensure that businesses could easily work across borders. It would ensure that there would be increased competition because people could transfer their labour and their skills across borders—business people could do that with their own staff. It would also ensure that we have a nationally compliant scheme in which changes could be effected very easily.

There are any number of regulatory areas where this would make very good sense. Another one would be consumer credit laws. I gave a speech in this place last year about—